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202 Revising and 1970s to act on their same sex desires in the context of the social movements of those time periods, and as many were advocating for basic civil rights. I had just finished writing a book on family formation and identity development among black lesbian women who were born during these time periods (Moore, 2011), and was curious to know more about those who had been adults during that time. I thought I would write a second book about this previous generation, this time interviewing women as well as sexual minority men. It was a nice, neat study design, and I created a great codebook that I used to analyze the qualitative interviews. Overall, I felt satisfied with where the project was heading.

However, as I began to write and rewrite, I kept hitting a brick wall. I was having a hard time understanding the full life stories of my interlocutors, and this was affecting the quality of the arguments I was able …